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May 23, 2024The Brooklyn four-piece have produced something truly special. This is a real statement of a record, one that sees them forge ever further skyward in their pursuit of monolithic shoegaze (‘Brown Paper Bag’, ‘Somber the Drums’) while also exploring softer territory on tracks so thick with atmosphere that their queasy melodies gnaw at the marrow of your bones.
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May 23, 2024DIIV have refined their brooding vibe and produced as gorgeous a record as you’ll hear this year.
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May 24, 2024With Frog in Boiling Water, their best album yet, the band is proving that their music is urgent enough and true enough to transcend whatever suffering it takes to make it work.
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May 23, 2024On Frog Boiling in Water, DIIV have once again shrewdly adapted, pivoting away from the chonky riffs of Deceiver and delivering the most tense, subtle, and cerebral music of their whole career.
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Jun 3, 2024While no song is earth-shatteringly amazing, there’s something (quite a lot, it seems) to be said for a record of nothing but great tracks. This really is a good shoegaze album with a nice atmosphere - but it’s also a little more than that. And it doesn’t seem to care about any of it.
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May 30, 2024DIIV have synthesized a bunch of fresh influences, including guitarist Andrew Bailey’s penchant for hip-hop, plus the band’s new-found fascination with sampling and tape loops, to craft their most diverse and perhaps finest album to date.
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May 24, 2024Though its songs about a world falling apart were difficult for DIIV to make, Frog in Boiling Water is their most cohesive work. It's a true slow burn of an album, capturing listeners by degrees and echoing the band's subtle yet dramatic growth since Oshin.
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UncutMay 23, 2024It's a beautiful-sounding record with tracks like "Somber The Drums" and "Everyone Out" providing moments of tender poppy beauty amid the general sense of decay. [Jun 2024, p.32]
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May 24, 2024Frog in Boiling Water offers evocative images, like the dejected, “Stuck on the ground” and “wasted” “Brown Paper Bag.” But it makes its best case as a “political shoegaze” album through its tone.
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May 24, 2024While Frog's vocal melodies are often simple, with nursery-rhyme lightness, tuning into their lyrics make them seem more like sugar-coated pills. They establish Smith as both an objector of the failing system and another one of its many idle subjects, free-floating in the rush of disappointment.
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May 30, 2024Frog in Boiling Water approximates the flowers in Glazer’s film. It is a beautiful album with gorgeous tracks. Nonetheless, they ultimately distract from, rather than illuminate, the important subjects they seek to address.
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May 23, 2024The album is certainly dreamy, but its lack of urgency may also cause some listeners to snooze.
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Record CollectorJun 12, 2024Murky, dour and troubled, Frog In Boiling water is a beautiful warning, but a warning nonetheless. [Jun 2024, p.101]
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May 29, 2024The likes of ‘Little Birds’ and ‘Raining On Your Pillow’ are lullingly linear, driven by routine drum patterns and interchangeable vocal melodies. Depending on your perspective, the sparse instrumentation is either ‘minimalist’ or ‘undercooked’, oscillating between the polarities across the course of this languid collection.
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May 24, 2024The renewed cohesion and collaboration may have saved the band during this album’s recording process, airing grievances and settling put-off tensions, but the resulting homogeny of their sound lacks real bite and feels muddied.